Steve Jobs, who can demolition competitors with a single product, is set to move back into the demolition business despite his ill health.
Steve Jobs, who can demolition competitors with a single product, is set to move back into the demolition business despite his ill health.
Use to getting his own way the Tech Titan has convinced his Local Council that he needs to demolish his 1926 Spanish Revival estate because it is falling down around him.
After years of legal battles, the Woodside Town Council last week agreed that the 14-bedroom, 17,000-square-foot home could be torn down. A demolition permit could be issued as soon as next month.
Jobs plans to build a brand new home much to the angst of protesters who have spent years objecting to the demolition of the house that was built by a “copper magnet”.
After more than a decade empty, the house that once hosted the likes of Shirley Temple, Charles Lindbergh and Richard Nixon is destroying itself claims Jobs local web site siliconvalley.com.
Bougainvillea that once graced the front facade with bright pink flowers has grown thick and monstrous, wrapping its arms around the terrace. Tendrils creep up the balcony, grasp a vulnerable edge, and pry off chunks of white stucco that crash to the ground and lay still.
Ceilings have collapsed under puddles of rain water. Broken windows have lured in the mould. An owl took roost in the master bedroom. And lizards scamper everywhere.
“We call this demolition by neglect,” said Brian Turner, law fellow at the San Francisco office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who has been fighting to save the house.
Siliconvalley.com writes, Jobs bought the property in 1984, the year he introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world. He lived there for nearly a decade before renting it out and moving to Palo Alto. Time magazine once photographed him sitting on the expansive, sloping lawn with the gleaming white fortress behind him.
But Jobs, whose iPods get smaller and sleeker every year, never really liked the house. It had no historical designation when he bought it and he had always intended to tear it down and rebuild on the oak-studded, graceful property: “This house isn’t a good family house to live in. It’s gigantic,” he told the Woodside Town Council in 2004. “It’s not the house I’d like my family to live in, anyway.”
